bullet points
by hyacinthian
Summary: Post-war. These are the things Angelina learns. GeorgeAngelina.


These are the things Angelina learns once they're married:

George is an absolutely sore loser.

George is ticklish on his right side, but not his left.

George likes addictions. He'll eat sweets until he's nauseous, no matter how many warnings she gives him, no matter how much he tells himself that he'll regret it later. He drinks himself into stupors where he can barely Apparate himself home (usually, riding side-along with one of his mates).

George is actually a quiet person. Cut away the rest of the Weasley family, Lee Jordan, an audience, and there are entire days where he will sit in the same room with her, barely making a noise. She knows he hears too much noise in his head. She knows because she hears it too. The battles they have lived through are on constant replay and it's enough without her trying to make spaghetti bolognese with banging pots and pans that from this distance somehow sound like the dying shrieks of someone she knows.

Sometimes George hates his family. He doesn't say this, but she feels it when they go 'round for family dinners. His shoulders will tense beneath the sweater his mum has knitted him, no letter in the center anymore. He smiles and smiles; everyone smiles and smiles; Harry Potter there too, smiling away, and she thinks it all feels like a greeting card, plastic and perfect and something everyone knows isn't real.

Sometimes George hates Angelina.

They have these knock-down blow-out fights and she stays toe-to-toe with him - she has never been one to back down; that just isn't how West Indian girls do it. There is yelling, there is screaming. Someone will inevitably bring up Fred, and one by one, they dwindle their dishes down by charming them to fly at walls, by throwing them at each other.

She even hits him once - a slap across the face - when the insults that come flying out of his mouth turn personal.

It's all about Fred.

It's always about Fred.

He walks away then, his cheek marred with a bright red mark; she doesn't even have the energy to cry.

And somehow, they will still have the energy to crawl into bed together, without speaking, without touching, and just lie there, feeding off of each other.

Whether this is a good thing or a bad thing, Angelina has no idea.

Her mother calls it a curse.

(She thinks they left too long ago for the curse to follow them across the ocean; her mother says _never underestimate the strength of a good curse_.)

George represses.

He doesn't talk about things, doesn't write them down, doesn't whisper them to anyone - not inanimate objects, not her, not his friends, not even to himself. She thinks one day he will burst, like a bad pipe, steam pouring out through the breaks. He does not assure her that it won't happen, doesn't assure her that he's fine.

She supposes he expects her to break first.

She thinks about leaving him once. (It doesn't happen.)

They fight when she's pregnant, when she finds out the sex of the baby.

"I'm not going to name _our_ son, Fred," she says, hands on the kitchen counter that Molly thinks is too messy, too much the wrong color, too different.

"He's my son."

She turns, glowering. "He's _our_ son, George, and if you hadn't noticed, you're not exactly the one - "

"He was my _brother_!"

Her voice tremors. "This _baby_ is not going to be your memorial. I _loved_ Fred," she says, and he closes his eyes, jaw clenching, hands balling into fists at his sides, "but this isn't - _fuck_, George, I am _not_ losing someone else to this war." She whips the dishrag at the back of the chair.

She rocks on her heels.

"Angelina - "

"This is _not about you_, George! And it isn't about me either. _We_ are going to be a family. The past is - "

He shakes his head. "Angelina, _please_."

She bites on her tongue to stop from screaming, to keep her voice as calm and steady as possible. "I'm not doing it, George. I'm _not_."

He shoves a chair so hard it knocks into the wall. "_Damn it, Angelina_!"

She resolutely stares at her hands. "Find someone else then if that's all you want. I know your mum hates me."

And in his voice, the bitter resignation that she has become so familiar with. "Yeah, she does."

He disapparates and she accidentally makes a teacup shatter into pieces. 

* * *

><p>The day she goes into labor, her mother is stuck in Tobago.<p>

They name the child Fred anyway.

She doesn't speak to Molly for two years. 

* * *

><p>Angelina learns things about herself.<p>

She learns that she cannot stand to be touched after waking up from a nightmare.

There's something about another person's presence that seems too stifling, suffocating. When she wakes up with that nervous tremor or the heavy feeling in her chest that precedes sobbing until she can't see, can't breathe, can't stop, he just sits there and looks at her, hands resolutely at his sides.

Angelina learns she misses her mother's cooking more than anything else.

Angelina learns that homesickness can come like a snake, its fangs sinking in deep without warning, without notice.

She learns that after carrying the burden of another life, after breathing life into something else, the weight of something else slides onto her shoulders until she wakes up every day, feeling like she would rather sleep for another ten years.

George tries to make her cheering tonics, but it lingers and it itches. The weight doesn't go away and George finds that he has to remind her to eat because otherwise she won't.

They fall into long stretches of silence where he will just play with the baby and she will stare sullenly into the distance, thinking of all the names she had been considering for their son.

None of them began with F. 

* * *

><p>It isn't a birthday or an anniversary or anything special the night George calls his parents to take the baby for the evening.<p>

"What?" she says, with a narrowed eye. "Sex?"

He slips his fingers through hers. "Women. It's always sex with you." And then he's pulling her out the back door where there are brooms leaning against the house. "Thought we could go for a nice little night ride."

Angelina sighs.

She forgets sometimes just how much she misses Quidditch, just how big a role it used to play in her life.

They fly over London at cloud level, the feeling of the clouds against her face ice cold, but it's okay. The wind is in her hair and the moon is bright overhead.

They hover in the air above St. Paul's, watching the world down below, and he says quietly, "Angelina, I'm sorry."

She says, "We're all fucked up one way or another. To be expected."

His lips quirk into a bitter smile. "He probably would've loved it."

"Fred?"

"Everyone walking around gloomy and serious."

Angelina snorts, the tip of her broom handle wavering a bit. "He probably would have lit something on fire."

George chuckles. 

* * *

><p>When they're back at home, Angelina just strips her clothes off, walking naked upstairs to their bedroom, crawling into bed.<p>

He slides into bed next to her, the covers pulled over their heads, his hands cold as he brushes them down her side.

"Sometimes I think we're still sixteen," he whispers. "I'm waiting to grow up and know what I'm doing."

She presses a gentle kiss to his lips.

His hands explore her body that night, palms and fingertips skimming over her neck, collarbone, the ticklish space of her ribs, the soft roundness of her breasts.

He commits her to touch memory - the fullness of her thighs, the warmth and wetness of her sex.

He says, "I'm sorry," and licks a line from her throat to her breasts, his fingers still buried inside her.

The bed creaks.

And when he's inside her, everything is slow, gentle, meticulous.

Her toes curl when she comes. 

* * *

><p>In the morning, she plays with his hair. <p>

* * *

><p>Fifteen years later, she supposes that's the moment they started forgiving.<p> 


End file.
